A. A. Milne Quotes

Two chicks. I mean, ladies... ah - women, girls, whatever the term is. I'll get it. I've got it marked down somewhere.

'Actor' and 'actress' don't have to be gendered or sexed.

In a perfect world, in my opinion, 'they,' 'them,' and 'theirs' would be the pronouns that everyone would use.

There is something false in this search for a purely feminine writing style. Language, such as it is, is inherited from a masculine society, and it contains many male prejudices. We must rid language of all that. Still, a language is not something created artificially; the proletariat can't use a different language from the bourgeoisie, even if they use it differently, even if from time to time they invent something, technical words or even a kind of worker's slang, which can be very beautiful and very rich. Women can do that as well, enrich their language, clean it up.

Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and togas.

Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

Write to register history, and name each thing. Write what should not be forgotten.

You should just write the movie based on people you actually know and then just see who wants to play it. Cast the net.

I go to restaurants and the groups always play "Yesterday." I even signed a guy's violin in Spain after he played us "Yesterday." He couldn't understand that I didn't write the song. But I guess he couldn't have gone from table to table playing "I Am The Walrus.

Who does not know that the first law of historical writing is the truth.

Writing for me, even what you call serious writing, is play.

In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.

What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.

All fiction is lies – if it weren’t, it would be biography, history, or reportage.

I started writing plays, but the fact that plays don't last forever was too much for me to bear.

The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.

The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.

The only kind of film I want to write is a story where I can keep on seeing the stories play out. I'm a huge television fan, and I'm a huge continuing storyline fan.

I play piano, by ear. Yes, I write songs... and good ones.

My father told me when I first started that standup is exciting and I should pursue it, but that writing would be the thing that would give me power over my career. I never have to take a road gig or a writing gig I don't want because I always have the ability to play one against the other.

Men must speak English who can write Sanskrit; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one.

I can hardly believe that I even know this, but I am aware that Noah Webster's original dictionary, apart from being the first truly American lexicography, was a kind of line in the sand. It claimed a very discrete, American form of the English language, explicitly to compare it to the English of our erstwhile colonial masters who had been operating under Dr. Johnson's dictionary rules for well over a century.

Now, as God the maker play'd he taught the game to Nature whom he created in his image; taught her the selfsame game which he played to her.

Writing plays for me is often an act of looking at basement-level fears in terms of where they come from.

Our everyday language has become encumbered, Germanic, artificial, bureaucratic, inorganic. It may not be exaggerated to say that by now American writers face but two alternatives: write English, or write gobbledygook.